Jessica Tuchman Mathews is a distinguished fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She served as Carnegie’s president for 18 years. Before her appointment in 1997, her career included posts in both the executive and legislative branches of government, in management and research in the nonprofit arena, and in journalism and science policy.
She was director of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Washington program and a senior fellow from 1994 to 1997. While there she published her seminal 1997 Foreign Affairs article, “Power Shift,” chosen by the editors as one of the most influential in the journal’s seventy-five years.
From 1982 to 1993, she was founding vice president and director of research of the World Resources Institute, an internationally known center for policy research on environmental and natural resource management issues.
She served on the Editorial Board of the Washington Post from 1980 to 1982, covering arms control, energy, environment, science, and technology. Later, Mathews wrote a popular weekly column for the Washington Post that appeared nationwide and in the International Herald Tribune.
From 1977 to 1979, she was director of the Office of Global Issues at the National Security Council, covering nuclear proliferation, conventional arms sales, and human rights. In 1993, she returned to government as deputy to the undersecretary of state for global affairs. Earlier, she served on the staff of the Committee on Energy and the Environment of the Interior Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Mathews is a member of the Harvard Corporation, the senior governing board of Harvard University. She has served as a trustee of leading national and international nonprofits, including the Nuclear Threat Initiative, Radcliffe College, the Inter-American Dialogue (co-vice chair), four foundations (the Rockefeller Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Century Foundation, and the Joyce Foundation), and the Brookings Institution. She co-founded the Surface Transportation Policy Project, has served on study groups at the National Academy of Sciences, and is an elected fellow of the American Philosophical Society. Since 2001 she has served as a director of SomaLogic, a leading biotech firm in the breakthrough field of proteomics. She is also a director of HanesBrands Inc. and a member of the governing board of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
Mathews has published widely in newspapers and in foreign policy and scientific journals, and has co-authored and co-edited three books. She holds a PhD in molecular biology from the California Institute of Technology and graduated magna cum laude from Radcliffe College.
And so, Henry Kissinger’s new book, Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy, seems at first glance to be both timely and potentially valuable. Kissinger sets out to examine the ability of great leaders not just to deal successfully with the circumstances they face but to profoundly alter the history unfolding around them.
Still, these shifts would amount to a dramatic alteration in U.S. practice since the end of the Cold War. America would no longer see itself as “the cop walking a global beat,” as neoconservatives would have it, nor would it shrink its core interests to defense against threats from China and Russia, as some realists have proposed.
A profound global change shapes the foreign policy of the Biden administration. The United States’ global reputation as unquestionably the greatest power, with a thriving democracy and an economy envied by all, is now gone.
The Biden administration is beginning to chart its own course for U.S. foreign policy. How does Washington intend to deal with an increasingly powerful and influential China while avoiding a direct collision with Beijing? What will the strategy for containing Russia entail? Carnegie Moscow Center organizes a virtual discussion to explore these issues and more.
Throughout the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign, Biden asserted that under his leadership, the United States would be “back at the head of the table.” But a return to the pre-Trump status quo is not possible.
The cold war ended peacefully, and the deployed nuclear arsenals of the U.S. and Russia have been reduced by nearly 90 percent, but we are not safer today—quite the reverse.
A wide-ranging conversation on how bipartisan consensus enabled an out-of-control US military spending spree that continues to this day.
Former President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace discusses how bipartisan consensus enabled an out-of-control US military spending spree that continues to this day.
Notwithstanding the Democratic candidates’ relative silence on foreign policy thus far, the next president will likely have to make international decisions of historic significance. It is important that they say more about how they would approach them before a nominee is chosen.
Of all federal spending other than the mandatory allotments to entitlements and interest on the national debt, discretionary spending is everything else the government does.